Interesting Briefing at Splunk Live on Cyber Warfare

I’m at Splunk Live right now, in Crystal City, Arlington, VA – a gathering of around 600 out-of-shape sysadmins who use Splunk to help reign in their enterprise data.

A pretty interesting first briefing was given by a retired Colonel who gave us all a high-level overview of Cyber Warfare.

One of the more interesting quotes was (unfortunately) one that I didn’t take a photo of. But the gist was that the key in weathering any sort of cyber attack was in combining a Army-style approach to “situational awareness” with an active exploitation of the enemy’s weaknesses.

This was an interesting approach – as when under attack, I’ve always been first focused on my OWN weaknesses, rather than focusing first on the weaknesses of the enemy and what they don’t know or can’t do.